Together with Avedon, Penn, Steichen, Strand, Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, Albert Watson and a few more, he is one of the truly great photographers. For me. They are all different and perhaps I should not compare them. So I don´t. Read the article from The Guardian, by Sean O `Hagan.

See the images and imagine the sound that he recorded. 😊 Pelle

Smith took many famous pictures, but also taped hours of audio of jazz greats, writers and artists of the day in his New York loft. A new book explores his strange world

Smith was perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay. His visual narratives, usually published in Life magazine, were often brutally atmospheric. He evoked the horrors of the second world war in the Pacific, where he was injured by mortar fire, and chronicled the working life of Dr Ernest Ceriani in the small town of Kremmling, Colorado, in his 1948 series, Country Doctor, now recognised as the first extended editorial photo story.

In 1955, Smith became a member of the Magnum picture agency, travelling to Pittsburgh for his first assignment, which entailed producing 100 photographs in three weeks to mark the city’s first centenary. He worked on the project for three years, producing around 21,000 photographs. Today, his legacy is maintained by the W Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, which celebrates and encourages the kind of humanistic photography he pioneered, if not the impossible tasks he set himself and his beleaguered editors.

A US soldier during the final days of fighting to gain control of the island of Saipan from occupying Japanese forces during the second world war. Photograph: W Eugene Smith/Life/GettySmoke pours from the chimneys of an Ohio steel mill in a 1949 picture for Life magazine. Photograph: W Eugene Smith/Life/GettyCountry doctor Ernest Ceriani photographed after having performed a caesarean section during which both baby and mother died due to complications. The picture, taken in Kremmling, Colorado, was part of Smith’s groundbreaking photo essay for Life magazine in 1948. Photograph: W Eugene Smith/Life/Getty

The other day I went to Old Town here in Stockholm. Already filled with lots of tourists. A great place to be. Many cafés and restaurants. Galleries and shops. I went there to test a favorite lens. A TS 45 mm. I like the way I can handle it. Like how I work with my Sinar view camera. Though it is so much smaller and comfortable to bring a SLR on a walk. This is how my images looks like. 😊 If you get a chance, visit our Old Town! You don´t have to walk among all the tourist shops. There are small adventures on every narrow side street. Perhaps you, as I did, just can stumble upon a small concert in a church.

They do, and once again I wish I had all the time in the world just going around enjoying exhibitions. Together with Avedon and Albert Watson he is one of my absolute favorite photographers. Over the years I have got so much inspiration from his work. The frozen fruits, cigarette butts, flowers, the backdrops and SO MUCH more. Recently we have been fortunate here in Stockholm to see his work at Åmells. What more could a photographer my age ask for? 😊 Pelle

Penn’s use of sharp, angled corners in his sets fit the narrow frame of his subject in the portrait “Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1948.” Credit Irving Penn Foundation, Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Irving Penn: Centennial,” spanning decades of the photographer’s work, opens on Monday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Credit Irving Penn Foundation, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Alex Wroblewski for The New York Time

Once a photographer, always a photographer. You don´t have a career for 50 years if you´re not a photographer by heart. A great title for the book. 😊 Pelle

He was best known for his Pulitzer prize-winning photo, Saigon Execution, but Eddie Adams won over 500 awards for his work, throughout a 50-year career. Starting as a photographer in the marines, he covered war zones, refugees, riots and celebrities. Eddie Adams: Bigger Than The Frame is published by the University of Texas Press.

Magnum has always been, and is always great photography by great photographers. Oh, there are SO MANY exhibitions I would like to see…

I found this in The Guardian.

😊 Pelle

As part of its 70th anniversary program, Magnum Photos is holding an exhibition of photographs taken in New York City during the early years of the agency, from 1947 to 1960. The show includes classic images from their archive, as well as pictures from their New York office. Early Magnum In & On New York is at the National Arts Club Grand Gallery until 29 April, can be viewed online and prints purchased through Magnum.

Great to see these images from a young Bod Dylan! I was happy to attend his first concert here in Stockholm last Saturday after that he received The Nobel price. A great concert by a great artist. He has changd his hat. 😊 Pelle

As Bob Dylan accepts his Nobel prize for literature this weekend, an exhibition of photographs of him on the cusp of international fame is planned to open in New York. The photographer Ted Russell first met Dylan in 1961 and his intimate pictures of Dylan performing, and at home, are the subject of a show at the Steven Kasher Gallery featuring dozens of images never before seen in the city. Bob Dylan NYC 1961–1964 opens on 20 April and will run until 3 June.

Interesting read from NY Times written by Teju Cole. Teju Cole is the magazine’s photography critic and the author, most recently, of the essay collection “Known and Strange Things.” Read more in the full article!

Images make us think of other images. Photographs remind us of other photographs, and perhaps only the earliest photographs had a chance to evade this fate. But soon after the invention of photography, the world was full of photographs, and newly made photographs could not avoid semantic contamination. Each photograph came to seem like a quotation from the great archive of photographs. Even the earliest photographs are themselves now burdened by this reality, because when we look at them, we do so in the knowledge of everything that came after. All images, regardless of the date of their creation, exist simultaneously and are pressed into service to help us make sense of other images. This suggests a possible approach to photography criticism: a river of interconnected images wordlessly but fluently commenting on one another.

A photograph can’t help taming what it shows. We are accustomed to speaking about photographs as though they were identical to their subject matter. But photographs are also pictures — organized forms on a two-dimensional surface — and they are part of the history of pictures. A picture of something terrible will always be caught between two worlds: the world of “something terrible,” which might shock us or move us to a moral response, and the world of “a picture,” which generates an aesthetic response. The dazzle of art and the bitterness of life are yoked to each other. There is no escape.